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Captain Sexyvoice Asks Why Nintendo Won’t Let Us Give Them More Money

Any perception of railing mercilessly on Nintendo recently is strictly coincidental (at least, until I find out what today's 3DS downloads are). This is actually a valid argument for giving Nintendo more of our money... if it would let us. Meet Andrew Eisen, a man with a quality headset for recording videos, a taste for Japanese video games, and all the affectations of a white Billy Dee Williams. And if you can ignore his Colt 45-pitching verbal swagger for a minute, you can hear his very good point.

Nintendo is passing up on publishing a lot of great Japanese games in America. The Last Story. Xenoblade. Another Code R. Disaster: Day of Crisis. Pandora's Tower. Fatal Frame 4. No, these aren't system sellers, but they're games of such appeal to hardcore gamers, especially hardcore JRPG/J-Adventure/J-Survival Horror gamers, that they would almost certainly make Nintendo a significant amount of money. Eisen ran the numbers and looked at the trends and found that tons of games released in both America and Japan, no matter how obscure or Japanese, get more sales in America than in Japan. Consider the success of games like Muramasa, Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, Trauma Center, and Arc Rise Fantasia, and of extremely Japanese publishers like Atlus, XSEED, and Aksys. Japanese games aren't just for the really, really, really dorky otaku nerds who want anything from Japan anymore. We want quality games, even if they're weird, and especially if they're spiritual successors to Xenogears or created by the man behind the good Final Fantasy games, or was directed by Suda 51 to be utterly terrifying.

These games are already made. Many of them are already ported to English, so they literally just need to be switched to NTSC and re-pressed. That's it. It's not like a major effort Nintendo would have to go through. Even if it was a series of short, limited runs, the company could easily make a big chunk of money in America by putting out these games. And, as Eisen noted, we can't even play the European releases, already translated, because the Wii (and the 3DS, sadly) are both region locked. Even if we bought the games legitimately, as importers do, we can't play them.

This isn't even an understandable decision by Nintendo to ignore hardcore gamers because they'll still give the company money for the big system seller games. Hardcore gamers will give Nintendo even more money for these titles, but Nintendo doesn't seem to want that. 99% of the work is done getting the games to the U.S. They've been developed. Several have been translated. It's just a matter of making them compatible with American Wiis and selling them here. Once again, Nintendo is just refusing to move an inch to please the hardcore crowd. And this time, they're actually giving up money in the process.